Cospire Beta 1
Copyright 2006 Snoutholder Inc. All rightes reserved.

Snoutholder Inc. Mission: To make knowledge sharing practical and addictive.

One of the largest problems for business and organizations today is the inability to manage knowledge effectively. Having easy access to the right information when you need it as well as an infrastructure that fosters creation and sharing of new knowledge are essential assets for any collaborative effort. Cospire’s value comes from addressing the following problems:

• Irrelevant or Outdated Knowledge: It is a great challenge for a knowledge base to keep up with a rapidly changing world. Too often, the most current and pertinent knowledge is scattered throughout an organization in the heads of its members.
• No Incentive for Collaboration: Contributing to an organization’s knowledge base costs time and effort. Collaboration needs to feel worthwhile to members. More often then not, contributors don’t get credit for sharing information with others. In fact, it is deemed not in their best interest given the perception that “knowledge is power” and sharing knowledge makes an employee/member less valuable.
• Knowledge Discovery: Even if desired information exists in the knowledge base and is up to date, members must be able to find the knowledge they care about rapidly.

To tackle these challenges, Cospire took lessons from a number of successful online communities to create software uniquely designed around people to foster a healthy knowledge sharing community. Cospire facilitates this with several broad features:

• The community is self aware: Cospire was created with community in mind. For example, members of an Cospire knowledge management system are known to each other through personal profiles. In addition, knowledge contributions by members are measured which builds contributor reputations. This provides rewards for sharing knowledge rather then what is often found in organizations - knowledge hoarding.
• Knowledge Evolution: Cospire encourages knowledge evolution by allowing fast and intuitive editing of existing articles and annotations. However, if needed, restrictions can be applied to any article in the community.
• Survival of the Fittest Information: Cospire uses a variety of algorithms that, over time, estimate the worth of individual units of knowledge of information which is used to filter for the “best” knowledge. For example, a search for information about "widgets and digits" may turn up several articles but it will be those that are rated highest implicitly and explicitly by the community that are put at the top of the search result.

Beyond these unique features, Cospire has the basic features that consumers should expect from a knowledge sharing community:

• WYSWYG Editor: The major features of leading word processing programs are built into Cospire. No esoteric markup language to learn!
• Discoverability of Knowledge: With a powerful search engine as well as an intuitive category browsing system, relevant knowledge can be easily found.
• Knowledge Organization: All knowledge can be categorized using Cospire's powerful and flexible category system.
• User Permissions: An Cospire community can be walled off from outside users. This would be a likely scenario for a private business community. In addition, individual members of a community can have different permission levels.
• Access Anywhere Anytime: Because Cospire is a web-application, you can access your community knowledge from anywhere you have an internet connection.
• Blog and Wiki Functionality: Blogs and wikis have received a lot of press lately. Blogs and wiki functionality is a subset of Cospire’s features.
• The Newest Technologies: Cospire is built using Microsoft's just released ASP .NET 2.0 framework which takes full advantage of Microsoft's newest database software (SQL Server 7.0). This ensures better security and a better user experience.

Although other applications have one or more of these features, none meld them together into a functional system like Cospire. Before you spend a lot of time and money on an IT solution for your knowledge management needs, give Cospire a try. Cospire's basic service is free so you have NOTHING to lose! Visit our home site to get started.